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A performative approach to studying processes of systemic innovation in the energy sector

Brenneche, Nicolaj Tofte(Frederiksberg, 2013)

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Abstract:

The ongoing efforts to transform energy systems towards becoming environmentally sustainable provide a rich empirical source for cases of organizational creativity in the form of collective entrepreneurship, co-creation and collaborative innovation. In this paper, I will briefly introduce the challenge of organizing knowledge production in context of open-ended energy system transitions and argue, on the ground of a critical reading of established innovation management research, that a processual approach is needed in order to analyze how system transition processes are pursued through an entrepreneurial form of collective agency-in-progress through e.g. partnership arrangements. I will put particular emphasis on presenting a methodology for doing innovation process research performatively which I have developed during the course of my ph.d. research where I have participated in a European strategic partnership since 2009. Considering this partnership as a case of relational entrepreneurship within the organization of energy research, the methodological discussion puts focus on how to study this performatively – that is, how to not only theorize and study relational entrepreneurship as a practice of others, but to perform relational entrepreneurship through a research practice. The paper comprise an introduction and then a excerpt from my methodology chapter from my ph.d. thesis which I am close to finalizing.

Although they have developed very much in isolation from each other, we argue the theory of
entrepreneurship and the economic theory of the firm are closely related, and each has much to
learn from the other. In particular, the notion of entrepreneurship as judgment associated with
Frank Knight and some Austrian school economists aligns naturally with the theory of the firm.
In this perspective, the entrepreneur needs a firm, that is, a set of alienable assets he controls, to
carry out his function. We further show how this notion of judgment adds to the key themes in
the modern theory of the firm (i.e., the existence, boundaries, and internal organization). In our
approach, resource uses are not data, but are created as entrepreneurs envision new ways of
using assets to produce goods. The entrepreneur’s decision problem is aggravated by the fact
that capital assets are heterogeneous. Asset ownership facilitates experimenting
entrepreneurship: Acquiring a bundle of property rights is a low cost means of carrying out
commercial experimentation. In this approach, the existence of the firm may be understood in
terms of limits to the market for judgment relating to novel uses of heterogeneous assets; and the
boundaries of the firm, as well as aspects of internal organization, may be understood as being
responsive to entrepreneurial processes of experimentation.
Key words: Entrepreneurship, heterogeneous assets, judgment, ownership, firm boundaries,
internal organization.
JEL Codes: B53, D23, L2

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This PhD dissertation is based on four published articles. It operates within the
processual view of entrepreneurship studies (Steyaert, 1997), which draws on process
philosophy to develop research strategies (Sørensen, 2005). The research has been
guided by two strategies for understanding entrepreneurship: ‘moving’ (e.g. Steyaert
and Hjorth, 2003) and ‘unveiling’ (e.g. Jones and Spicer, 2009). These strategies have
so far been pursued largely in the conceptual domain, and this doctoral dissertation is
an effort to take them a step further by combining empirical investigation and
philosophical reflection. The aim is to investigate how a processual study of
entrepreneurship ‘should be worked out’ in practice (Kristensen, Lopdrup-Hjorth and
Sørensen, 2014).
The first two studies contribute an empirically informed conceptualisation of
entrepreneurship, the first focused on how organisations are created, the second
providing stories of emerging practices of female entrepreneurs. Though they aim to
provide alternative conceptualisations, they remain firmly rooted in ‘traditional’ social
science, offering alternative approaches to the dominant understandings of
entrepreneurship, and utilizing accepted and traditional methodologies and theories.
The last two papers are more experimental in their design. The aim is still to
problematize discursive or practical aspects of entrepreneurship and processes around
entrepreneurship, but also to investigate alternative methods for creating knowledge.
The third study explores the somewhat paradoxical results of SME support schemes
and develops a role-play-enhanced focus group technique. The fourth study is based on
an organisational ethnography in antiquarian bookshops and experiments with fictional
accounts and literary techniques as methods to generate knowledge.
The contribution of this dissertation to processual studies in entrepreneurship research
is twofold. The first two papers are illustrations of an application of process concepts,
while the last two papers illustrate the attempt to create process concepts. Taken
together, the studies demonstrate how a processual study of entrepreneurship might be
worked out in practice.

This article takes up Lefebvre’s challenge to apply the intellectual tools of the
academy to the practical production of urban space, and discusses an effort to
make use of our theories of signification in re-articulating stigmatized suburbs.
Often referred to as ‘vulnerable’, ‘disenfranchised’ or ‘marginalized’,
stigmatized suburbs and the people living in them are targeted by many social
and economic initiatives simply because they are distinctly vulnerable,
marginalized or disenfranchised. In so doing, initiatives interpellate and
reproduce the geographical imaginary that is both the outcome and the source
of their target groups’ political disadvantage. The article shows how a
particular community initiative attempts to overcome the problem of
interpellation. It uses Callon’s notion of ‘the qualification of products’ to
understand the initiative’s efforts to transcend the objectification of the
targeted groups as well as the symbolic limitation of agency. This allows us to
follow the process by which the initiative attempts to re-symbolize the body
and the neighborhood identified through the category of ‘the immigrant’. The
article suggests that efforts to overcome the problem of interpellation must go
beyond the realm of the symbolic to include, as well, social and material
elements. The article ends with a reflexive note on the extent to which the
engaged scholar is also caught within the interpellation paradox.

The present report is drafted for the SUCCESS1 project; a pilot project launched by the EIT with the purpose of benchmarking past and ongoing collaborations in the knowledge triangle of research, education and innovation in the European Union. The empirical focus is the field of climate and energy research. This field is in specific need of more efficient collaborative models that can facilitate knowledge sharing and thereby ease the development of new sustainable energy technologies. By analysing existing projects and processes in this field, we are able to derive new and improved models of governance structures for integrated partnerships in order to improve the innovation processes. The final goal is to work towards recommendations on the process of strengthening relations within the Knowledge Triangle of education, innovation and research in the European Union. With this report, we aim at providing a solid ground for establishing and analyzing best practice collaboration in the field of climate and energy research.

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Communication makes a difference. The manner in which we communicate creates the phenomena we communicate about. It can seem obvious, but we are nevertheless seldom aware of the complexity this constructivist assumption implies. Through an analysis of a new salary system in the public sector of Denmark (called New Wage), this paper theorizes this complexity in terms of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. It identifies four wholly different ‘codes’ of communication: legal, economic, pedagogical and intimate. Each of them shapes the phenomena of ‘pay’, the construal of the employee and the form of management differently. In this chaos of codes the managerial challenge is to take a second order position in order to strategically manage the communication that manages management itself.
Key words: Management; personnel management; human-relations; pay-system; communication; system-theory; discursive epistemology

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From their beginning in the 1930s, critical theory and the Frankfurt school had their
focus on a critique of disturbed social relations in western society dominated by
totalitarian political regimes like Stalinism, Fascism, Nazism, and by capitalism as an
oppressive and destructive economic system and culture. Now, 80 years later, this
has all become history and thus it is time to leave the concept of critical theory behind
us, and instead bring the concept of critique to a broader theoretical framework like
hermeneutics. This allows the possibility of retaining the theoretical intentions of the
old Frankfurt school and at the same time there will be no boundaries by specific
dominant theoretical perspectives. In this paper, such a framework for a critical
hermeneutics is discussed on the basis of Weber’s, Gadamer’s, and Habermas’
theories on hermeneutics within the social sciences.

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The thesis is an inquiry into how leadership is performed narratively in the cultural sector.
Chapter 1 draws the cultural sector as a narrative landscape, and the reader is invited on
a tour around this narrative landscape as seen through the eyes of some of the top guns in
the cultural sector. Seen from this vantage, leadership in the cultural sector seems to be
predominantly performed by relating narratives with reference to the metanarrative of the
Enlightenment. The inquiry, however, draws on Lyotard (1984) to argue that such
extralinguistic legitimization is in a crisis of legitimacy, wherefore the inquiry embarks on
a problematization of the dominant understanding of leadership in the cultural sector with
the activist aspiration of suggesting a postmoderning understanding of leadership in the
cultural sector being performatively legitimized. Chapter 2 argues in favor of a relational,
non-entitative understanding of narratives and it points to emplotment as a process of
finding the best fit. This relational understanding of narratives allows the project to inquire
into leadership performed narratively in all kinds of empirical settings, not confining itself
to formal leadership contexts. Chapter 3 offers a genealogic approach to what the project
has defined as the dominant narrative in the cultural sector, the narrative of art for art’s
sake (the AFAS narrative), which the project argues function as an implicit standard. This
includes notions of aesthetic autonomy such as suggested by Kant in 1790, artistic freedom
and art for its own sake such as claimed by artists in the Romantic era, and the arm’s
length principle as the ‘constitution of cultural policies’ in the post WW2 Western world.
Chapter 4 provides an overview of alternative voices which have challenged the dominant
narrative. These include post colonial studies, cultural entrepreneurial studies and
consumer behavior studies which in various ways propose alternative ways to lead and
support the cultural sector. Chapter 5 links the discussions in chapter 3 and chapter 4 to
leadership studies, notably to discussions of leader-centered orientations versus leading
relationally orientations. The chapter concludes by suggesting a new sensibility towards
understanding leadership and meditates on how this might be achieved, paying attentions
to the possibilities of overcoming the putative crisis of legitimacy the inquiry is placed in.
Chapter 6 relates a case-study of Malmoe City Library which endeavors into a difficult,
yet very promising process of reformulating what a library may become in a contemporary
context. This process challenges the dominant narrative and thus the current
understanding of what a library should be, and this deviation from the dominant narrative
challenges leadership. Chapter 7 assembles three different approaches to challenges the dominant narrative and to make new interpretive resources available to the understanding
of leadership in the cultural sector. First, givrum.nu, a social movement working with arts,
second, Mogens Holm, a leader in the cultural sector in a transition phase, and third,
Copenhagen Phil, a classical symphony orchestra striving to avoid becoming a parallel
society phenomenon. These case studies are conducted as written interviews with the
cases, in an attempted un-edited form to also introduce relational processes informed by a
power with relation to my own research project. Chapter 8 reflects on the case-studies in
chapter 6 and chapter 7 in light of the two approaches to leadership discussed in chapter 5.
It does so by linking my study to relational leadership theory in order to see how this
theoretical field might inform my inquiry and how my inquiry might inform this field. It
equally offers five possible reconstructions of the cases before concluding the research
project by summing up contributions to the empirical field and the research fields, as well
as by pointing to areas which could be further developed in future research.
In line with the aspirations of the relational constructionist framework of the project, the
inquiry does not offer a conclusion. Instead it encourages further reconstructions, thus
submitting itself to the performative legitimization it argues in favor of.